IN 2017 WITH A MAJORITY IN BOTH HOUSES

Radical Republicans ramrodded a law through Congress — and the rich made out like bandits

By David Cay Johnston, DC Report @ Raw Story - Commentary

Published on September 8, 2020
President Donald J. Trump celebrates the passage of the Tax Cuts Act with Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan | December 20, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)


The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim he created the best economy ever until the pandemic.

Trump policies help the prosperous and rich, including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats.


The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man” and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

The figures in this story come from my annual analysis of IRS data known as Table 1.4. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns. I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect inflation of 4.1% between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).

This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year of the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.

High Income Households Multiply

Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans. And, oh, do they benefit!

Prosperous and rich people, the data reveal, include half a million who are not even filing tax returns. Yet they are not being pursued as tax cheats, a separate report shows.

The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.

Who Saves on Taxes

The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.

Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of 1 percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.

Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.

Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.

Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings.

This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for most Americans, along with cuts in government services, it is surprising Trump enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000.

But realize none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.
Understating Incomes

The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.

Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that the service cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The sharp decline in IRS auditing means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.

Trump Ignores Rich Tax Cheats

In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the treasury inspector general for Tax Administration reported May 29.

Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the inspector general wrote.

One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. DCReport’s five-part series last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.

Borrowing to Help the Rich

Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.

The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.

The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.
Curious Anomaly

In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half a percent.

THE 1% ARE THE RENTIER CLASS
The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.

The new tax data also show a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks and have other sources of income from capital.

Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.

Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.
Infuriating Fact

There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data

The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.

Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.

Rentier capitalism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Rentier_capitalism

Rentier capitalism is a term currently used to describe the belief in economic practices of ... Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by 'clipping coupons' [in the sense of collecting interest ...

‎Usage by Marxists · ‎Current usage

Class, Rentier | Encyclopedia.com

www.encyclopedia.com › applied-and-social-sciences-magazines › class-re...

Aug 6, 2020 - BIBLIOGRAPHY. Rentier is a class of people who derive their incomes from financial titles to property. Though the term makes an analogy with the old rent-earning class of great landowners, rentiers are characterized by their more distant relationship to the property they own.

Rentier Class financial definition of Rentier Class

financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com › Rentier+Class

For example, a landlord who agrees to rent out a house for a set amount each month for a year is a member of the rentier class. So is a pensioner living on a ...

Dilemmas of the Rentier Class - The Baffler

thebaffler.com › salvos › dilemmas-of-the-rentier-class

But of course at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, we have lavished all sorts of tax breaks—such as cuts in capital gains and estate taxes—on the ...

Mainstream Economics Has Become a Celebration of the ...

evonomics.com › mainstream-economics-become-celebration-wealthy-rent...

Mainstream Economics Has Become a Celebration of the Wealthy Rentier Class. The One Percent have found a pressing need for the services of mainstream ...

Rentier capitalism does not come with a reset button

www.newstatesman.com › politics › economy › 2019/09 › rentier-capitalis...

Sep 20, 2019 - The rentier class is not an aberration but a common recurrence, one which tends to accompany periods of protracted economic decline.

What's Wrong with Rent and the Rentier? | Section on Marxist ...

marxistsociology.org › Blog article

Dec 19, 2019 - It is of course true that monopoly power is not unique to rentierism. It frequently characterizes other forms of capitalist enterprise as well.

What is Rentier Capitalism? - The Prindle Post

www.prindlepost.org › Ethics News › Business

Mar 12, 2019 - Economic rent is the unearned value within a profit. The term “rentier” refers to someone who obtains private capture of this unearned value. In ...

COVID-19, a stigma to many, quietly taking toll on South Florida's Haitian community

2020/9/6 21:34 (EDT)

©Miami Herald

MIAMI — Fritzner Fabre, a healthcare aide who cared for coronavirus patients, spent his final days holed up in a ramshackle North Miami-Dade efficiency, coughing and wheezing. He was 41 when he died at the hospital.

Another Miami man, architect Pierre Martin, suffered from heart troubles and diabetes. Believing he’d simply caught a cold, Martin refused to go to the hospital until it was too late. He was 69 when COVID-19 killed him.

Then there was Pastor Marcel Métayer, who kept his Fort Lauderdale Baptist church open as a spiritual haven for the local Haitian-American community, even as the coronavirus surged during the summer. The faithful noticed Métayer, 63, gasping during his sermons. He blamed his labored breaths on getting wet in the rain.

Métayer had in fact contracted COVID-19, and was admitted to Fort Lauderdale’s Florida Medical Center. He died on July 28. Hours later, one of his assistant pastors, Féquière Espérant, 65, also died from the disease at the same hospital.

These deaths, only a few of over 100 officially documented, underscore a troubling reality: The highly contagious coronavirus is quietly ravaging South Florida’s Haitian-American community. And there are complex cultural factors that make COVID-19 a particular challenge to deal with — and sometimes to even discuss — for many Haitians.

“The stigma is huge,” said South Florida Dr. Sidney Coupet, who heads a public health task force within the Haitian American Coalition of South Florida that was created to improve outreach, testing and services during the pandemic. “A patient who I treated in the hospital … . They discharged her. She beat COVID. The way she was speaking to me, it was as if she was embarrassed. They’re afraid their families and friends would never come visit them again.”

The exact scale of how the virus is affecting South Florida’s Haitian Americans is difficult to gauge because state health officials do not track infections by ethnic groups other than Hispanics. But at least one statistic suggests an outsized impact: deaths.

With Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jean Monestime — the sole Haitian American on the commission — and other Haitian community leaders pressing for more details on COVID-19 victims earlier this year, the Miami-Dade Medical Examiners began adding “Haitian” when a victim’s background could be documented using information culled from families, hospitals and, mostly, funeral homes who submit biographical details to the state for death certificates.

Those numbers have proved sobering. At least 5% of the county’s COVID-19 victims have been Haitian Americans, a group that comprises an estimated 4% of the county’s population. In all, at least 105 of more than 2,000 deaths in Miami-Dade as of the end of August have been members of the Haitian community — and experts say that tally is likely a significant under count because it has not been possible to conclusively trace the background of many victims.

In fact, the first documented COVID-19 victim in Miami-Dade was a 94-year-old Haitian woman, Dieumene Etienne, whose family couldn’t be reached.

Missing data on ethnicity and hospitalizations obscure the pandemic’s real impact, said Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s not possible to discern, with any precision, if Haitians are being disproportionately affected — and that by itself is a problem,” she said.

The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office does not identify Haitians among the dead but community leaders believe the toll there likely has been similar.

“It’s impacted the Haitian community more than people realize,” said Pauline Louis-Magiste, president of the Haitian American Nurses Association of Florida. “Unfortunately, the data collection doesn’t really give you the statistical number on how Haitian Americans are being impacted.”

But this is clear: More than six months into the pandemic, minorities have borne the brunt of the novel coronavirus, suffering and dying at disproportionate rates than whites. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control itself says “long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.”

In Miami-Dade, Blacks overall have died at disproportionate numbers — 19% of COVID-19 deaths for a group that makes up 17.7% of the county’s population. Blacks also have been hospitalized at a higher clip.

Like other ethnic groups, Haitian Americans suffer disproportionately from underlying conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity, have less access to healthcare and often work jobs that require them to be out in the community. From nurses to caretakers at nursing homes, Haitian Americans also make up a sizable part of South Florida’s healthcare workers who are most at risk of contracting the novel coronavirus.

And beyond medical conditions, community leaders say that language barriers, belief in herbal remedies over traditional medicines, and historical discrimination and stigma stemming from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, make the community even more vulnerable to COVID-19.

Some Haitians have a hard time accepting COVID-19, said Louis Herns Marcellin, a University of Miami socio-cultural anthropologist and director of the Global Health Studies program.

“They will talk about la fièvre,” Marcellin said, using the French and Creole word for fever, echoing the dismissive tone often used by people in Haiti. “They talk about it in terms that are not necessarily public health terms that we can understand … that we can use or rationalize to generate interventions or prevent action.”

From the start of the deadly pandemic, community leaders and some local elected officials recognized that raising coronavirus awareness among Haitian Americans would be a challenge. Like their friends and relatives in Haiti, they did not understand the virus, did not fully believe in the science of it and were reluctant to change behaviors so ingrained in Haitian culture — like greeting one another with a kiss.

Early on, Coupet, the health task force chair, joined with other prominent Haitian-American doctors and nurses to start the task force under the coalition, a group of about 20 community-based organizations. Along the way, they’ve recorded public-service announcements in Haitian-Creole, spoke on Facebook Live events and called religious leaders to talk about safety measures for their congregants, hoping to employ them in the battle given the community’s strong faith and work ethic.

“When everyone else was practicing social distancing, they were still out there working as taxicab drivers, cleaning ladies, those who are getting paid cash for different types of work,” Coupet said. “And I know that intimately because I take care of those people.”

County commissioner Monestime said he successfully pushed the mayor’s office to include Creole translators at press conferences, and helped establish, with state Rep. Dotie Joseph, a walk-up testing center at North Miami’s Holy Family Catholic Church.

“They’ve taken small steps, but I don’t think they’ve done enough,” Monestime said of county efforts. “This is an issue that has been addressed with the county, over and over again but the county has turned a blind eye when it comes to outreach.”

The office of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez says the county has included Creole versions of every post, video and press release, and had voice-overs for every press conference on COVID-19 done by the mayor. Outreach workers, known as the SURGE team, have also passed out Creole-language fliers in hot spots.

According to the county, $188,427 — or 22% of money spent on outreach — has been spent on Haitian Creole outreach to buy radio spots, produce billboards and posters and newspaper and digital ads. The county is also planning to soon release a series of public-service ads with Miami medical personnel of color.

“It’s a recognition that they’re a high-risk group,” said Myriam Marquez, a mayor’s spokeswoman.

Still, Haitian-American leaders say not enough has been done by Miami-Dade or Broward and

the governor’s office to spread the message to a population that relies heavily on Creole-language radio for information, not social media or YouTube.

“The challenge is how do you communicate with people who are so hard to reach?” said Leonie Hermantin, co-chair of the coalition’s social services task force. “We tried to talk to the County communications office … They sent us to a YouTube channel. That’s what they did. One day we were blitzing a news conference asking, “Kote Kreyòl? Kote Kreyòl?” — Where is Creole? Where is Creole. Again, they referred us to a YouTube channel.”

North Miami Vice Mayor Alix Desulme, whose city is majority Haitian American, wrote a letter in March to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pleading that more steps be taken to communicate key points in Creole. He says he received no response about his concerns that little outreach has been done statewide.

“We spent some money on radio,” Desulme said. “As a city I think that we have done the best that we can, not having many resources but in terms of a global outreach, there has not been that.”

Fred Beliard, who owns Island TV, a cable news station that provides news in Creole, said he has received no money from the county for ads. The few spots about COVID-19 that ran during Haitian Heritage Month, between May 4 and May 31, aired free of charge.

“We’ve been trying but we got very little,” Beliard said. “The county hasn’t paid for COVID-19 ads. They only paid for Census.”

This week, after Herald inquiries, the county informed Beliard that it had approved his COVID-19 proposal, and will purchase $7,500 worth of airtime for a 30-day COVID-19 campaign on the station.

In Broward County, Mayor Dale Holness acknowledged his administration hasn’t conducted a specific campaign to target the county’s growing Haitian community. But he said he’s done plenty of interviews on Haitian and Caribbean radio stations.

“I don’t know that we’ve done enough but I believe that the reach is there,” Holness said. “Folks are getting the information that we have available as to what’s going on.”

THE VICTIMS

In both counties, the Medical Examiner rolls reveal a broad cross-section of Haitian Americans who have died. The Haitian elderly, as they have among all racial and ethnic groups, have been hit particularly hard.

Marcel Pierre-Charles Senatus was 80-years-old and one of 25 elderly patients who died after contracting the disease at the Claridge House Nursing & Rehabilitation in North Miami-Dade. On April 18, staffers called his wife to say he was being sent to Jackson North Hospital.

“The nursing home never said what he had. They just said he was running a high fever,” said his daughter, Sabine Senatus. “They couldn’t control it and they had to ship him out. And the next thing, he passed away on the 20th. He was on a ventilator and they said he had a heart attack during the night.”

In a culture where honoring the dead is so important, his funeral was muted — most of his large family was forced to view his funeral on a laptop.

Family could never figure out how Pierre Martin, the 69-year-old architect who died at North Shore Medical Center, caught the virus. He largely stayed at home, although he made some runs to Costco, said his wife, Guyrlda Martin.

“They need to be careful. They need to be cautious,” Guyrlda Martin said of fellow Haitian Americans. “This is not a game. This is serious.”

In Fritzner Fabre’s case, he was much younger — he had been a rapper in Haiti with a group called Majik Clik. In Miami, he toiled in anonymity as a healthcare aide, and had “extensive sick contacts” with people diagnosed with COVID-19, according to a Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s report. Other major factors in his demise: “poorly controlled” illnesses, including tuberculosis.

A neighbor recalled that in the weeks before he died, Fabre could be heard coughing and wheezing. ‘Neighbor, I’m sick. I don’t have anyone who can make soup for me,’ the neighbor recalled Fabre saying through the door.

The neighbor often brought Fabre soup, leaving it on his porch. Finally, on May 18, a friend drove him to Jackson Memorial Hospital. He died on May 30 after going into septic shock.

Another healthcare worker who died of complications from COVID-19 was 43-year-old nurse practitioner Julie St. Preux.

Her family said she had heart surgery in February but had recovered and resumed working at a nursing home in Hialeah. Her daughter said St. Preux tested positive for COVID-19 after a hospital visit in the weeks before her death — but then claimed she took another test that said she was negative.

St. Preux’s husband denied that his wife had died because of COVID-19. His daughter acknowledged they’d had a “big funeral.”

Evans St. Fort, who runs St. Fort’s Funeral Home & Cremation in North Miami Beach, said accepting that COVID-19 is the cause of death, has been difficult for many of his primarily Haitian-American clients. Business has increased by 30 percent, since the pandemic began in early March.

“I get phone calls every single day from families, at all times, explaining that they are so confused because their loved one was fine, and all of a sudden they check into the hospital and are diagnosed with COVID and a couple of weeks later, that family member passes away,” St. Fort said. “I see a lot of individuals in their 60s and 70s.”

BATTLING MISINFORMATION

As with the public as a whole, community leaders say denial and misinformation have been particularly vexing for South Florida’s Haitian-American community.

When the pandemic hit, North Miami Beach’s Legene Gouin kept working at a Chinese restaurant until he fell ill with a cough and a fever. His boss sent him home. Even though he went to get tested for the coronavirus, Gouin — who suffered from hypertension and obesity — kept running errands, assuring relatives he was fine except for a stomach ache.

“We told him to go to the hospital because there was this disease out there. He said ‘No,’ “ said the mother of his children, Marie Fleurimond.

Fleurimond discovered Gouin, 51, dead on the couch of his North Miami Beach house on July 2. Two weeks later, a testing lab — not knowing that he died — called Gouin’s cellphone to say his test results were ready. Fleurimond said the representative hung up the phone when she said Gouin was dead.

Like with the public as a whole, some Haitians have fallen for conspiracy theories — many spread through Facebook and the messaging service WhatsApp. One tale that went around: that masks were being sprayed with poison.

Combating the spread of misinformation has been a huge focus of Sant La, the Miami social services agency that established the coalition and started a morning radio hour on WSFR, a Haitian radio station, during the pandemic to reach the community.

“There is another world that we don’t see. It’s the world of WhatsApp and the miscommunication that happens,” said Hermantin, who works for the agency and has access to scores of community groups, many of them churches, on her cellphone. “We fight to bring the right information and we are fighting with the focus that people are spreading misinformation on WhatsApp.”

UM anthropologist Marcellin and others also note that some in South Florida look to how Haiti itself is coping with the pandemic — in most cases, turning to traditional herbal teas, normally used for coughs and fevers, to prevent or cure COVID-19.

“I love my heritage but we are stubborn when it comes to medicine,” said Louis-Magiste of the nurses’ association. “Unfortunately, COVID is not afraid of your natural herbs.”

Marie Etienne, a nurse who is a member of the task force, has seen the misinformation firsthand.

A few months ago, she volunteered to help at a testing site in Homestead when a young man in his 30s walked by. Staffers beckoned him to come get tested. He shook his head and refused. Etienne walked over and began speaking to him in Creole. Surprised, the man began peppering her with questions: Will you implant something inside me? If I get tested, will I be able to travel back to Haiti? Are you injecting something inside me?

He even asked to see a business card showing she was a nurse. Finally, he agreed.

“Haitians are afraid to come out, for fear of being deported, for fear of being stigmatized,” Etienne said. “We have to debunk all of those myths.”

CHURCHES HIT HARD

Etienne, Louis-Magiste, Coupet and others on the COVID-19 task force say faith leaders are critical in sharing information and raising awareness especially as Haitian-American Protestant and Catholic congregations are starting to get hit hard by the deadly disease.

At the iconic Notre Dame D’Haiti Catholic Church in Little Haiti, funeral services have been held for at least 17 parishioners who have died of COVID-19, according to the parish’s priest, Father Reginald Jean-Mary.

The deaths of the pastors of Renaissance Evangelical Baptist Tabernacle in July jolted the tight-knit Protestant community in South Broward and North Miami-Dade, as well as Haitians as far as New York, who heard the news. Until then, most of South Florida’s Haitian community deaths from COVID-19, had taken place in silence.

While many churches closed their physical doors earlier this year, Renaissance kept its doors open, hoping that requiring masks, adding hand sanitizer stations and limiting congregants would ward off the virus. Many of its congregants are essential workers in healthcare and other jobs that required them to be out during the pandemic.

“As much as they were doing social distancing, they were wearing masks, I said, ‘Come on. You’re in the closed church for hours. It’s just a matter of time before somebody sneezes, something happens and you know one person can infect everybody,’ “ said Jennifer Lovelace, a longtime church member and nurse practitioner who ended up caring for both pastors during their hospital stay at Florida Medical Center.

With both pastors sharing the same microphone, Lovelace said she “strongly” believes they got infected in the Church.

On his hospital bed, Métayer told Lovelace that he planned to move services completely online. He died before he could return. News of his death flooded the social media feeds of Haitian Americans. The church has since been shuttered.

“It’s a heartbreaking story,” Lovelace said. “We are all in disbelief.”

———

(Miami Herald Staff Writers Rob Wile and Nicholas Nehamas contributed to this story.

———

©2020 Miami Herald

No, there will be no COVID-19 vaccine before Election Day — and it’ll take two years to vaccinate the US: doctor


Published on September 6, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris

Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci press conference (Screen Capture)

President Donald Trump desperately needs a COVID-19 vaccine to help him get through the election in November. The problem, however, is that it’s never going to happen, no matter how hard he tries.

Trump didn’t take the virus seriously until it had spread so far that the stock market cratered, and people panicked, hoarding food, toilet paper, gasoline, water and more.

“Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do ― you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat ― as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape, though. We have 12 cases ― 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now,” said Trump Feb. 10, 2020.

“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” he also claimed.

“My administration has done a job on really working across government and with the private sector, and it’s been incredible. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. I have to say,” Trump said over a month later, Mar. 29, 2020.

“I’d rate it [our response] a 10. I think we’ve done a great job,” Trump claimed, also in March, just before New York City was forced to bring in a make-shift morgue to hold the bodies stacking up in the hospitals.

Now, Trump is lying again, saying that he’ll have the vaccine in time for the Election. In fact, his administration has put states “on notice” that they need to create distribution centers for the vaccine and have them up and running by Nov. 1.

According to Dr. Jonathan Reiner, George Washington University professor of Medicine, don’t hold your breath on Trump’s claims.

“First of all, no vaccine will be distributed before Election Day,” he said frankly. “Even if we identify a vaccine, which looks both safe and effective, the distribution plan will be really complex. First of all, these vaccines require subzero storage. So, you need a supply chain that can do that. We’ll have to pick who gets the vaccine first. Health care workers, the elderly, nursing homes, people at risk. There is an elaborate plan that will go into this. So, it will take a while to get the vaccine into people, and vaccination will take probably two years to vaccinate the country.”

Public confidence in the vaccine is eroding as Trump appears to be rushing whatever he can get to market as fast as possible for political reasons. It has prompted Americans to speculate that anything the Food and Drug Administration rushes out won’t necessarily be safe. As a result, a greater percentage of Americans are saying they won’t get the vaccine.

“We have to do exactly the opposite of what is being done now,” said Dr. Rainer. “Instead of emphasizing speed, right, there needs to be — used to be an ad that says speed kills. Instead of advocating speed, we need to advocate safety and efficacy. Dr. Peter Marks, who heads up the section of the FDA tasked with approving biologics like vaccines, has publicly stated that he won’t allow a vaccine that he would deem to be unsafe for his family to be administered to the public at large. We need to hear people like that speak out. We’ve also heard from pharmaceutical companies involved in creating these vaccines say the same thing.”

Drug companies have indicated that they were working quickly, but they aren’t cutting corners, despite White House pressure. Dr. Reiner said that he hopes more come out to explain that and promise that the drug will not be dangerous.

See his full statements below:

 

Vessels stall and sink at pro-Donald Trump boat parade held on Texas' Lake Travis

There was no evidence of foul play, the sheriff's office said, adding that no injuries or medical emergencies were reported at the parade

Agence France-Presse September 07, 2020 07:50:26 IST

Boaters flying flags honoring Trump

Houston: A Texas boat parade in support of President Donald Trump.S. President Donald Trump crowd Lake Travis in Lakeway, Texas, during a boat parade Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, that attracted hundreds of watercraft of all sizes. Although this boat did not capsize, a spokesperson for the Travis County sheriff’s office in Texas said “several” boats sank Saturday while taking part in the parade in support of Trump. There were no reports of fatalities or injuries. (Bob Daemmrich via AP)'

Trumps reelection campaign ran into trouble on Saturday, as multiple vessels took on water or sank, authorities said.

The Travis County Sheriff's Office "responded to multiple calls involving boats in distress during the Trump parade on Lake Travis," it said on Twitter. "Several boats did sink."

There was no evidence of foul play, sheriff's office spokeswoman Kristen Dark said. No injuries or medical emergencies were reported at the parade on Lake Travis, located northwest of Austin.

"Some were taking on water, some were stalled, some were capsizing, it was all types of different things," Dark said.

Photos on Twitter showed boats flying Trump 2020 flags in choppy water, likely caused by the large number of vessels moving closely together.

"There were an exceptional number of boats on the lake today," Dark said, adding authorities were still gathering data on how many boats sank and how many people were rescued.

More than 2,500 people marked themselves on Facebook as having attended the Lake Travis Trump Boat Parade, which Dark said was two to three miles (three to five kilometers) long.

The parade, taking place over the US Labor Day holiday weekend, was to feature four parachutists jumping out of a helicopter with smoke and flags, according to the event's Facebook page. Boats were asked to travel at 10 miles per hour.

Trump faces Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the 3 November election.

ALSO TRUMP BOATS WERE SUNK BY WAVES ON THE ST CROIX RIVER IN MINNEAPOLIS THIS WEEKEND

Trump Boat Parade On St. Croix River Causes Capsizing ...

minnesota.cbslocal.com › 2020/09/06 › trump-boat-parade-on-st-croix-riv...

1 day ago - But, there's also something physiologically happening in the body. ... MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A boat parade in support of President Donald ... “The river was flooded with boats,” Smith said. ... display of a few hundred boats had some people watching from their ... Prior to that, he worked in Las Vegas

Boats Keep Sinking and Capsizing at the Trump Boat Parades

nymag.com › intelligencer › 2020/09 › boats-keep-sinking-and-capsizing-at...

12 hours ago - The president loves his “beautiful 'boaters,'” his well-off, pleasure-craft-owning supporters who, since early May, have held nautical parades 

THERE WERE EARLIER TRUMP BOAT PARADES LAST MONTH THAT ALSO HAD BOATS SWAMPED

Boat Sinks During Trump Boat Parade On Willamette River

www.buzzfeednews.com › article › tasneemnashrulla › trump-boat-parade-...

Aug 17, 2020 - A Boat On The Willamette River Sank After Being Swamped By Waves ... was happening on the river but that suddenly there were dozens of boats "coming at ... Malimon also shared a screenshot of a Facebook post by a Trump boat ... Tyler Traudt, an 18-year-old who took part in the Trump boat parade and ..

Boaters scream for help as vessel sinks after being swamped ...

www.newsbreak.com › news › boaters-scream-for-help-as-vessel-sinks-afte...

Aug 13, 2020 - A group of boats flying flags in support of president Donald Trump created waves large enough in a ... Boaters scream for help as vessel sinks after being swamped with water by Trump boat parade ... You may also like. Trump ...

Trump Boat Parade Appears to Sink Nearby Vessel Swamped ...

www.newsbreak.com › Oregon State › Portland

Video has emerged showing a boat sinking on a river in Portland, Oregon, ... The clip, which has been viewed more than 250000 times on Twitter, shows the boat sinking as it took on water on the Willamette River on Sunday. ... Trump Boat Parade Appears to Sink Nearby Vessel Swamped by Waves ... You may also like.

Boats Keep Sinking and Capsizing at the Trump Boat Parades

nymag.com › intelligencer › 2020/09 › boats-keep-sinking-and-capsizing-at...

12 hours ago - On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, boats of “all shapes and sizes” were invited to don “as many Trump flags” as possible for a parade on ...

As Trump Parade Boats Sink In Texas, So Are The President's ...

www.forbes.com › sites › sethcohen › 2020/09/05 › as-trump-parade-boat...

2 days ago - While the images of the sinking Trump-flagged ships are no doubt ... For example, in August several upstate New York waterfront owners complained after a pro-Trump boat parade on Lake George purportedly created a wake ...